All but Death
by jappy13
Summary: The war is over and the Wizarding World is left to pick up the pieces. Hermione knows she should continue along the path she has created for herself - a future of NEWTs and a likely career in the Ministry. She soon faces reality as everything around her begins to fall to pieces, and she must either fall apart herself or find another way to live on... Possibly M in future
1. Chapter 1

**Hi. I've had this story in my head for quite a while now. I had never really given Hermione my full attention, however after reading 'Chasing the Sun' by Loten (a truly incredible read if you have not found it yet) I began to give her some more thought. She's an interesting character because so often people just portray her as the smart one, who miraculously seems to have answers to everything, and because of that always seems so sure of herself.**

**But really, if you _were_ that intelligent I doubt even that would save you from having an absolute breakdown, and perhaps you would look at the life you _could_ have had with your innate skills and you might even feel a bit of jealousy for that life that you have missed out on. What I'm saying is, what if Hermione suddenly woke up to the fact that in the magical world she's a genius, but that in the muggle world she's the equivalent of a high school drop out without qualifications. That the only place that can now accommodate her is the magical world for exactly that reason.**

**And what if, on realising that her only future lies in the magical world she begins to rebel against this thought. After all, what has the magical world done for her except traumatise her? What if she decides she's had enough of it (especially if post-war reforms aren't quite what she was expecting).**

**So yes, this is going to be Hermione-in-the-muggle-world fic, and I plan to introduce a bit of OC romance along the way just because I can.**

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Harry Potter or anything you recognise from the Harry Potter world. Ms Rowling owns that...lucky her!**

* * *

**All but Death, can be Adjusted**

by Emily Dickinson

All but Death, can be Adjusted -  
Dynasties repaired -  
Systems - settled in their Sockets -  
Citadels - dissolved -

Wastes of Lives - resown with Colors  
By Succeeding Springs -  
Death - unto itself - Exception -  
Is exempt from Change -

**Chapter 1: **

Hermione stared balefully at the plate in front of her.

"Spaghetti again Ginny?" she said, glancing up at the redhead still dishing out serves of meatballs and cheese laden pasta, after all they had had spaghetti and meatballs for the last five nights. She was rewarded by a piercing glare by the other witch.

Hermione sighed and look down again at the table.

It wasn't so much the repetition of the meals she had been having that was getting her down, it was the reason _behind_ why they had these meals.

In the past, ever since the very first time she was invited to the Burrow, the home of the Weasley's was one of the most comforting and welcoming places she could think of. And at its' heart had always been the kitchen. Hermione could easily recall sitting in the very same place she now sat and watching Mrs Weasley potter about over a cup of tea. The Weasley matriarch's kingdom was, without question, the kitchen. She knew where every single item lay in wait, she multi-tasked in a way that Hermione had watched with envy and tried to mimic in her own studies, and more importantly Mrs Weasley managed to monitor the lives and problems of those around her. All from her own personal control centre in the kitchen.

The kitchen itself wasn't anything particularly grand. Hermione looked around her and found it had changed very little in the years she had been friends with Ron. There was a gas oven that was old and, as Hermione had once found out, quite prone to spurting fireballs when one let down one's guard. The fridge and the cooler box were always filled with anything one might wish, and one of Hermione's greatest pleasures was the full cream milk that Mrs Weasley had always managed to get from a neighbour who owned her own cows. The wooden breadbox always held a freshly baked loaf, and the eggs in the egg basket were always fresh from the coop in the morning.

And at the centre of it all was Mrs Weasley. She would pat the stove affectionately as it spurted flames, and seemed to master the ability of whipping up a fresh batch of scones with jam and cream whilst pouring out dozens of cups of tea for her guests.

It had been truly idyllic, Hermione thought with a twist in her heart.

Because now, the truth was, this quaint little kitchen that had always provoked such warm and happy memories now seemed lacklustre. In Hermione's view it seemed as if the life had been drained out of it.

Mrs Weasley had barely emerged from her room since the Battle of Hogwarts five weeks ago. When she did emerge it was in a state that had the household holding their breath. She would come out of her room without warning, make her way to the kitchen and would then start some menial housework such as washing the dishes or putting the kettle on, until something or someone inevitably triggered something in her.

Those watching could never tell what exactly set her off. One minute they would be watching with baited breath as the Weasley matriarch, so often figure of strength and fortitude to her children, seemed to be clawing her way back from her despair, then the next moment something would happen - a sound, a sigh, a visual cue - and Mrs Weasley would break down into racking sobs. Those standing by would watch in helpless agony as they watched her crumble, collapsing into a chair.

Hermione had been present for a number of these episodes, and at each one she felt more and more helpless and miserable. She knew Ron and Ginny had no idea how to handle their mother in this state, and more often than not nowadays they would simply leave her in the kitchen, sitting silently in the living room until the sounds of someone shuffling upstairs were heard and the door to Mr and Mrs Weasley's room was clicked shut.

Ginny had taken on the mantle of chief housekeeper, and had been cooking for them all after Ron and Harry had claimed they would never eat another of Hermione's 'experiments'. It was true, Hermione thought with an internal smile, while camping with the boys she had discovered this one impenetrable truth - she had no aptitude for the art of cooking. She could happily appreciate the skills of others, but her own talents in that department were next to useless.

Ron on the other hand, had discovered he had inherited his mother's knack for putting together a meal from the barest of ingredients. When he had left Harry and Hermione during the hunt for horcruxes she and Harry had acutely felt the loss of his ability to mix and match spices. Harry had been able to dabble with the spice bag they carried with them, and had turned out some reasonable cooking attempts, but the artistry and subtle flavours that Ron produced had been absent.

Ron did not, however, enjoy the act of cooking. At all. He much preferred the end result. And because of this it was Ginny who had been left to take over the majority of the household chores. She had quickly learnt to adapt herself to the position, and Hermione had been quite impressed at the rate at which Ginny seemed to have picked up minor household spells. Hermione helped where she could, of course, but she had also been extremely busy in the aftermath of the Battle and didn't seem to have the same innate sense that Ginny had for running the Weasley household.

Even so, Ginny did not match Ron in the culinary skills. And thus their main nourishment came in the form of pasta every night, with an occasional roast chicken. Harry sporadically cooked omelettes for them all, but even that got tedious after a while.

Hermione watched Ginny from beneath her lashes. The young witch had certainly matured since the trio had left her at Bill's wedding so long ago. Hermione did not know the full story of what had happened at Hogwarts over the past year, and Ginny didn't seem like she was going to reveal anything any time soon. Hermione had asked Neville at one of the funerals they had both been at, however Neville's eyes had seemed to grow dark and he had told Hermione that it was business best left unsaid, and that he hadn't done much and that most of it was Ginny's story to tell anyway. Hermione had decided, upon seeing Neville's darkened face, that perhaps it was better not to ask questions.

"Yum!"

Hermione turned her head to the new arrivals in the kitchen. Ron's eyes lighting up when he spied the piles of food in his bowl. Hermione rolled her eyes. The only thing that ever seemed to lighten up Ron these days was food. His own tried and true comfort. In truth, Hermione was not just a little relieved at the way Ron's relationship with food served as a distraction when he began to get lost in his own thoughts. She was more than happy to pile up the servings on his plate in exchange for a smile, or a moment's rest from the near-constant sadness that was in his eyes.

The Weasley family had lost a part of their soul in this last war. With Fred gone, George and Mrs Weasley had fallen apart. George stayed in his room here at the Burrow, but never emerged. Each day one of the four would unofficially volunteer to carry his meals to him. They would venture into the room, their gaze directed anywhere but on the empty bed in the room - still made up as if its owner was only a floo-call away. They would leave the dish by George's bed in which a his shadowy lump stayed stationary, and when they returned to pick it up they would carry it away just as silently.

More often than not it came back untouched.

Hermione often paused in the room when it was her turn, holding her breath to check that the remaining twin was still breathing.

Mr Weasley had started back at the office. Hermione thought she had heard mention of a promotion, but if that was the case then no one was celebrating it. In fact, there had been lots of promotions amongst Ministry staff, but no one was in a festive mood. Most of the promotions were due to positions being vacated "_de facto_ mortality" and so getting a promotion was often just a reminder of tragedies.

His hours had increased, and he usually returned long after supper. He would grab the plates left out for him and Mrs Weasley, kept warmed by charms, and make the long and weary journey up the staircase to his room. The thing Hermione hated most was the look in his eyes as he did so - it was the look of a man who had been stretched beyond hope. Hermione had not been impervious to his physical state either. She could do naught but watch as he lost weight, as the bags underneath his eyes grew more prominent daily, as he developed a fine tremor that she noticed when he poured his tea.

Bill and Charlie had returned home to their respective countries. They had other lives to retreat to, and Hermione hated herself for envying them. They had the luxury of escaping this version of hell. They had stayed after the war for a week, during which they had helped the others rebuild the physical structure of the Burrow and strengthened their wards with complexities that Hermione had no hope of understanding only this far into her wizarding education. She strongly suspected they had mixed some blood ward magic in as well, and she was happy that after such a terrifying year she now felt relatively safe in bed at night.

Harry had, like Ginny, matured over the past year. Hermione had watched him turn from the moody and easily-angered teenager into a more mature young man who had, over the past few weeks, attended more funerals than anyone their age ought to have attended. He was often given the dubious 'honour' of speaking at the funerals, and Hermione had to admit that despite Harry's susceptibility to tempers and tendency towards mood swings (albeit less often and less forceful than before the Battle) he was a remarkably charismatic man. She supposed it was a role that he had never asked for, and certainly had never wanted, but Harry was proving to be a pillar of strength to the magical community in these tragic times. She had seen more than one young mother bring her child to Harry when he was out in public. The first time he had been approached thus it had been obvious he had no idea what to do. But Ginny had been by his side and had engaged the young mother in conversation before guiding Harry to perform a sort of blessing on the child.

It was unwanted attention, but Harry seemed to have resolved himself to his fate. He seemed, in Hermione's eyes at least, to have accepted that his name and infamy would forever follow him. Unlike in the past where Harry had resolutely run from any public outing, now he simply seemed to resign himself to the experience. Hermione wouldn't say he enjoyed it, but she could see that he would bear it without (much) complaint. He was growing up, she thought with a sad smile. It was just a pity that he had to grow up into such a role, that he couldn't have the quiet little life surrounded by naught but family and friends that she knew he had always wanted.

Ginny had forgiven him for leaving her to go on the hunt for the horcruxes. Initially she had been furious, but Hermione suspected it was more an act than anything after they had reunited after the Battle happy and whole. Ginny had, with everyone else, watched as Hagrid had carried Harry's limp body at Hogwarts. And she knew that it was an image that would be burnt into Ginny's eyes, just as it haunted her own dreams at night. After going through the whirlwind of emotions when they thought he was dead Hermione was hardly surprised that Ginny didn't hold out on her grudge.

In truth, Hermione couldn't remember the last time she had seen Harry as happy as he had been recently. The moments only lasted minutes, when he had Ginny curled into his side by the fireplace and baby Teddy tucked under the other arm. But in those moments Hermione could see that Harry's demons had now gone. She could tell instantly that his future would be a bright one. Harry had only ever wanted one thing; family. Now it seemed as if his dream was closer than he had realised.

And as for herself, she knew she had changed since that last battle. How could she not have? To have witnessed so much murder and bloodshed. To have seen torture. To have been tortured herself in Malfoy Manner. To watch Hagrid bring the lifeless body of her best friend out of the forest. Yes, she knew she had changed, although she could not pinpoint exactly how.

Maybe she had become disillusioned with the whole idea, she mused. She had seen first hand how destructive magic could be, and how prejudiced and ignorant the wizarding world was. This world, so reliant on magic, so shut from the rest of the world. Had any of them realised what globalisation was achieving? Had any wizard realised that phones existed and were a much easier method of long-distance communication than sticking one's head in the fireplace and often ending up with a sooty nose?

The war had made her question aspects of the wizarding world she hadn't thought to question previously. It made her see it all in a new light - although what exactly that light revealed she couldn't quite find the words to express. She still felt wonder and excitement at the idea of magic, and she appreciated that to be able to wield such magic was a gift, but now it all seemed somewhat polluted in her mind and in her heart. All her feelings were a jumble but she couldn't quite work out what her thoughts about it all were. Instead, she would have to slowly wait as that bundle unravelled at its own pace and allowed her to sift through things one at a time.

* * *

Ginny finished serving the pasta onto their plates and dinner continued with the same heavy atmosphere as it did every day. It was only the four of them at the table each night, and here in the burrow the tangible feeling of loss was never apparent than at dinner time. Each of them would sit quietly eating their meals, each lost in their own ghosts of times past, of previous occupants of the seats around them. They recalled past conversations, the dim memories of laughter and fun and pranks, of herds of redheads stuffing themselves with mountains of food with the echo of their mother's chastisements in the background.

BANG

Hermione startled out of her chair, and the four of them all stood suddenly, wands drawn reflexively. Mr Weasley opened the door, letting himself in. It had obviously been raining as he was sopping wet, and he hung up his dripping raincoat quickly by the door before turning around. He raised his eyebrows as he took in the defensive stance of the foursome and raised his arms in surrender when he noted the four wands trained on him.

Hermione was the first to sheepishly lower her wand. The reflexes that war had driven into them would take a long time to fade, and even sounds such as a door banging closed or the loud pop of apparition tended to result in the automatic response of 'wands first, questions later'.

The others resumed their seats, and they watched at Mr Weasley as he quickly cast a drying charm on himself and went to pick up his and Mrs Weasley's meals that Ginny had left in their bowls by the sink.

"Not much to report from the Ministry" he said. His face was drawn, and Hermione noticed that his shirt was crumpled. Every movement he made seemed to be laced with a bone-deep weariness and Hermione could only watch as the man who had once been so full of life, so excessively enthusiastic at the smallest things, seemed to have been drained.

She didn't know how much longer he would be able to cope, she only hoped it was long enough. Surely there would eventually come a time when Mrs Weasley and George would be able to face the day. It was just a matter of time.

Even so, the war had aged Mr Weasley as it had aged all of them.

_A great war leaves the country with three armies; an army of cripples, an army of mourners and an army of thieves_ Hermione remembered reading the quote in a book many years ago, and it had always stuck with her. How true she thought, and unconsciously rubbed the scar stretching down her left forearm. Nobody escapes war, even those that survive.

* * *

Ginny curled up within Harry's arm on the couch by the fire, a book resting on her bended knees. He sat rhythmically stroking her hair. He seemed to have zoned out, watching the flames in the fireplace curl upwards.

Hermione nestled herself next to Ron, whose arm came around to bring her closer to him. She laid her head back on his shoulder and tried to relax. It was difficult. Since the war had ended Ron was filled with tension, she could feel it in the knots of his back and the rigidity of his shoulders. She supposed that she also was likely full of tension. She certainly felt tense. She felt as if she couldn't relax, couldn't let go of the memories, of the thoughts, and of the thousands of things _wrong_ in the world that she wanted to fix.

But it was no use. She couldn't relax. Not now. Not when so many things were wrong.

"McGonagall wants us to go to Hogwarts tomorrow" she said into the silence.

"She's starting the rebuild later this week and wants to put everyone in working parties. She suggested we come along and help. She said our presence might _be added incentive_".

Harry snorted. He may have made peace with his public role, but he would never enjoy the frank admiration that thousands, despite never meeting him, had for him.

They fell into silence once more, each of them watching the wood crackle in the fireplace.

"I don't know if I want to go back" said Harry softly, and Ginny stirred against him.

"I haven't been there since...you know".

Hermione glanced up at Ron, who was sitting very still and watching Harry. His mouth drawn into a tight line. She knew what Ron wanted to ask because she wanted to know the same thing. Neither of them had broached the subject of what had happened in the forest, and although they had discussed it amongst themselves they decided they would wait until Harry decided to let them in.

"I...he...I don't know if I want to go back to that place" said Harry again.

Ginny turned around in her seat and held Harry closer, burying her face into his shirt. Harry was staring into the distance as if lost in a memory.

"Harry...we meant to ask earlier but it's been so hectic recently" she started. Ron squeezed her shoulders a little and she hoped that it was a squeeze of encouragement and support, not a warning.

"Do you think you could maybe tell us a bit about what happened in there? It might help you, and us, deal with it all." she asked quietly. She wasn't sure if she was playing with fire, and past experience had taught her that such personal questions and provoking personal memories had the ability to send Harry off into one of his rages.

"Yeah mate. I mean, we've not wanted to ask until now. But maybe, if we're going to go back tomorrow and all...maybe it's an idea to let us know a bit more about what happened" said Ron, squeezing her shoulder again. She was thankful she had him by her side.

"You know, because even though it was a bloody long battle once things started happening it was all over pretty bloody fast in the end, and then you...in the forest..." Ron trailed off.

Hermione knew what he was seeing in his mind. It was the same picture that plagued her at night.

_The woods were dark in the background, the battleground before them stretched for miles and was littered with shadowed lumps that were the remains of the witches and wizards that had given their life in this culmination of everything that Harry, Hermione and Ron had been working towards over this past year._

_The earlier sounds of battle had softened, and a temporary truce seemed to have been reached amongst the Hogwarts' survivors and the Death Eaters. Those within Hogwarts walls had moved onto collecting the bodies of loved ones, moving them en masse into the Great Hall._

_Hermione's stomach lurched when she saw the mountains of bodies, her mind conjuring up similar images she had once seen in a muggle history book about the second world war._

_She had left Ron with his siblings, quietly mourning over the loss of Fred. She had asked Ginny if she had seen Harry, but Ginny had simply looked at her with tear streaks on her cheeks and an almost vacant, deadened expression in her eyes that Hermione decided she did not want to explore at that moment._

_She had found Neville and together they had found a spot to rest outside, amongst the rubble and debris that was what remained of the great castle that had once stood there. Hermione hadn't been able to find Harry, she knew he had gone off on his own and just prayed that he wasn't stupid enough to listen to Voldemort's 'negotiations'._

_As if Voldemore would ever let them all live, even if Harry did turn himself over._

_But another part of Hermione told her that, knowing her best friend as she did with all his heroic tendency and desire to protect others, that he may well have done the unthinkeable._

_There was nothing she could do but wait._

_Much later, with the sun now long past its' zenith and on the homeward journey west, Neville imperceptivity straightened in his seat and Hermione could feel his muscles tense beneath her head. She looked up, and spied the movement that was happening at the edge of the forest._

_Quickly casting her Patronus and sending it to fetch Ron and the others, knowing that the others in the Great Hall would follow suit, she stood up and unconsciously wiped some bloody gunk off the seat of her pants._

_The figures drew closer, and Hermione could see one figure whose gigantic stature was unmistakeable._

_She squinted...Hagrid was carrying something? _

_She heard Neville's breath hitch next to her a second before she realised what she was seeing before her eyes._

_Harry._

_Dead._

_Harry Potter. HER Harry Potter...dead...no..._

_For a moment she couldn't breathe. Quite literally was not able to draw air in or expel it out as her chest seized in horror. Her world started to spin, every noise seemed to become both louder and softer at the same time. The world seemed to be a contradiction of states - everything was too clear, to bright, yet all too confused and jumbled for her to make sense of._

_A second later she felt Neville's hand on her arm._

_She heard Ginny's desperate cry then, mixing with the gasps of those around her as they, too, recognised the body within the half-giant's arms._

_She grabbed Neville with her other arm, clutching him to regain some sense of stability in a world that had just been turned upside down._

_A comforting warmth moved behind her, and she felt the unmistakeable weight of Ron's head as he buried himself in her hair, hiding himself from the horror they were facing._

_Harry._

_Dead._

_Voldemort had won._

Although it had been a whole five weeks since that moment, it was all too easy to recall the utter despair she had felt as her world had come crashing down, as she had believed in that moment that everything they had worked towards had been ruined.

Of course, when they had realised the truth, unbelievable though it was, she had been filled with an relief so profound there were not words to describe it.

Harry sat in the silence. For a long time Hermione wondered if he had decided to, once again, brush their questions aside and refuse to recount those moments where he had wandered away to fight battles of his own.

"I died" he said simply, still staring into the flames with a far away look in his eyes that suggested he was far removed from the cosy living room in which he physically sat.

"Voldemort killed me. Avada'd me. And I died." he repeated.

Hermione held her breath. Beside her she could feel Ron let out his own long, deep breath, shoulders tensing.

"And...I dunno...I guess I ended up somewhere, the place where you go before the next...ha, I always thought it'd be all rainbows and clouds and munchkins..." he chuckled darkly and trailed off. Hermione glanced at him, he seemed mesmerised by the flames, though his hand was stroking Ginny's hair while Ginny was staring fixedly into the distance now, lips taut with a white line outlining them.

"...and apparently I was a horcrux" he said finally, then let out a laugh that was harsh and contained a despair that Hermione knew he would never reveal through words.

Ginny had stiffened in his arms, seemingly frozen in place.

"A horcrux? But you couldn't have been...surely because you were human..."

"No. I was a horcrux. Definitely. Nagini was one so why not me? So when Voldemort shot the killing curse at me he ended up sealing his own fate apparently." Harry said, his lips twisting at his words.

"_Neither can live while the other survives"_ he spat, "how ironic."

Hermione felt ill. The very thought that Harry had had a part of Voldemort's _soul_ living inside him! It was impossible. Unthinkable. Yet now she thought about it, it made perfect sense in this screwed up world.

How had he turned out so well? He would have had to have had it in him since that Halloween all those years ago, and yet he'd turned out to be compassionate and loving and generous and all the things that his soul-mate hadn't been (and she thought that term was the most hideously appropriate phrase and vowed right then never to use it again).

"And when he hit you he killed his own soul...but how did you...did you know..." Hermione trailed off, working through the scenario as it must have played out. If Harry had gone to face Voldemort alone it meant he probably knew there was a reason, he would never have simply trusted Voldemort's offer to trade him for the other's lives. So if he _knew_ he was a horcrux...

"How did you find out?" she asked, her voice quiet but in this sickening silence it seemed to echo off the walls.

"Snape."

Silence.

Over the past few weeks Harry had seemed to take on a personal campaign to rid the world of all its negative portrayals of the late potions master. He had told everyone that Dumbledore had left memories to him which revealed that Snape had truly been on the side of the light the whole time. Hermione found it difficult to believe, especially the part about him having pre-arranged with Dumbledore the headmaster's final demise.

In fact, most people were paying little heed to his words, despite the fact that as Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived, and as the pupil who was well renowned for being bottom of Snape's very long list of unpleasurable company, was the one who was now standing up for the deceased man.

But Harry had been most persistent, and eventually McGonagall had relented and added Snape's name to the list of the deaths attributed to the light side. Harry was also in the process of getting the officials to put Snape's body next to his mother's at Godric's Hollow.

Hermione and Ron had been speechless when he had first told them. But the look in his eyes told them that it was not negotiable, and they had supported him in this as they supported him in everything. They hadn't yet heard the true account for the reasons behind this sudden change of heart.

"Snape leaked his memories to me as he was dying - Voldemort killed him just like I told McGonagall. And I watched the memories and saw that he had been on our side the whole time. He...he was a good man" finished Harry softly.

Hermione could tell Harry was reliving the moment. She glanced at Ron who was looking worringly at Ginny, who had not yet unfrozen from her shock over the revelation that Harry had been a horcrux. In fact, she was completely pale, eyes wide, and her lips seemed to be whispering something that only she could hear.

Hermione looked back at Harry who was oblivious to the turmoil the young witch in his arms was going through.

"And the other thing it showed was that I was a horcrux. Plain and simple. Dumbledore knew, of course" Harry's lips twisted again in distaste as he shrugged,

"Dumbledore knew that there was a possibility even all those years ago...so in the memories it showed that he had made sure I would be raised in a way that would mean I'd be happy to sacrifice myself."

He looked up at Hermione, who was now the one frozen in place. The ramifications of what Harry was telling her were too cruel to consider, but the way he looked as he told them...she couldn't help but believe him.

"Oh Harry" she whispered.

How manipulative, scheming, rotten, evil...and here they had been thinking that Albus Dumbledore was the greatest man who had ever lived! Harry had spent his years at Hogwarts idolising Albus as the mentor he himself had lost as a baby. All in one moment Hermione realised that the entire time the calculated and underhanded plan that the man had been brewing...raising Harry as a lamb for slaughter.

It was, Hermione thought to herself, on par with the Dark Lord himself.

She almost wanted to say 'good riddance' to both the old bastards, but knew that with all the respect that had been ingrained into her she would feel blasphemous to say that about Dumbledore's death...even if it was true.

Ginny suddenly sprang to her feet and steadied herself on the mantle above the fireplace. Harry rose to comfort her, but to Hermione's shock - and to Harry's - she pulled away from him.

"Don't!" she said, turning away from him.

"Don't. I know...I know that it wasn't your fault but...Tom...he was in you...and I..." she glanced back at Harry and Hermione could see her face was still pale, her freckles standing out against her pallor. She looked ghastly. She looked like death.

"Harry...just for tonight...please don't come near me" she said, choking on her last words as she almost sprinted from the room.

Harry was left standing with a look of utter dejection on his face as he watched her go.

Ron gave Hermione a last squeeze before heading off after Ginny, not even bothering to glance back at the pair left in the living room.

Hermione stood up, wanting to comfort Harry. But Harry simply turned away. His face was now stony grim and he put his forehead down to his clenched fist that rested on the mantle.

She went to touch his shoulder, but as she brushed the fabric of his shirt he wrenched himself away. He slamed his fist down hard against the mantle and without a glance backwards headed out of the room.

She let him have his space.

Hermione sank back onto the couch and buried her head in her hands, her fingers running through the wild bushy mess of hair.

_How had she ended up here?_


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning no one spoke as they sat and ate their breakfasts in the kitchen. Ginny and Harry were studiously avoiding looking at each other, and Ron hadn't said a word to Hermione despite the fact that he hadn't returned to their bed last night. She assumed he had stayed with Ginny.

Ron and Hermione had been sharing a bed since the end of the war. Hermione hadn't questioned the relationship from the moment Ron had kissed her after Harry had finally defeated the evil wizard who had haunted their world for all their lives. That first kiss...Hermione smiled as she recalled it. It was hard and fast and very different to her only prior experiences of kissing Victor Krum (and, she supposed, Cormac) who had had an entirely different approach.

But she had been thrilled, there on the battlefield, thrilled that the war was over, that their lives could regain some normality, that they were safe, that they were alive, that Harry wasn't dead and that finally, after such a long time of running and hiding and fighting to stay alive, of witnessing things that good people like themselves should never have to witness, that peace really did seem like an achievable dream.

After that Ron had kept her close, his arm around hers holding her in a half-hug as they drifted between states of euphoria with those around them, laughing and crying and celebrating the end of dark times, and states of absolute misery when something reminded them of what they had lost along the way.

And that night she again didn't question when Ron, announcing he was tired, held her hand and led her to the bedroom. Of course nothing romantic had happened that night, or for a few nights following, as they had regained their strength and slept like the dead in beds. Savouring the luxury of sheets and blankets and pillows.

It had been a few nights later that they had first made love. It wasn't quite what Hermione had expected, even after the initial hurt...no fireworks or fairy lights or moments of enlightenment...but it wasn't bad. Hermione had fun, Ron certainly had fun, and Hermione especially just liked laying there afterwards with a warm body in the bed to remind her that everything was alright in the world again.

But a small part of Hermione still wistfully thought of the books she had read from her mother's bookshelf. Passages of heated romances, sturdy men and night-time rendezvous had always stuck with her and she supposed she just had to come to terms with the thought that the difference between reality and fiction couldn't be helped.

What did destroy her fairytale imaginings, however, was what followed. Each night, as they drifted off to sleep, one or the other would inevitably wake up, screaming with visions of nightmarish corpses and scenes that regrettably had been all too true. Neither she nor Ron were managing to get much sleep at night, and had taken to putting silencing charms up around the room to ensure they didn't disturb anyone else.

She hated that moment when her breath caught as she finally jarred back to reality, sitting in bed sweaty and shivering and gasping for breath as the nightmares, still all too vivid behind her eyes, drifted into the distance although never completely fading away. She hated that moment when, with Ron awakened by the noise and rubbing her back in slow circles, she would break down and sob for what would seem like hours but was only minutes, before finally drifting back to sleep as fatigue overcame her once again.

And she hated how, if they did both finally get to sleep, they would wake up on opposite sides of the bed. The sheets between them empty and indifferent. It was as if, in their sleep, the distance between them that had developed over these past few weeks manifested itself in their nocturnal separation.

And she didn't even know where to begin to make it right again.

* * *

A while after breakfast they all silently congregated in the living room once more. So far no one had spoken of what had been said last night, and it appeared no one was willing to be the first to speak of it.

"McGonagall would like us to floo to her house for morning tea while she debriefs us of the plans for Hogwarts, and then we will meet with the others who will be helping over at the Hogwarts grounds." she said, although without a response from the others.

Sighing, she decided to be the first to take the initiative and grabbed a handful of floo powder before stepping into the large fireplace.

"Rickett's Point" she said loudly as the purple flames swirled around her and took her on their journey through the floo-hole.

She landed heavily in a room that, floo-enabled fireplace aside, could have passed as a muggle living room. The walls were a clean off-white and the room was set up with two black leather couches and, to Hermione's surprise, a small television set. In the corner was what was obviously a wizarding wireless set, and in the other corner was a cosy one-seater nestled next to an antique-looking bookshelf crammed with books.

Hermione knew her weaknesses...as did everyone else in the room. So no one battered an eyelid as she drifted over to the bookcase. She had read once that a person's bookshelf revealed more about a person's character than a 20 question personality test.

She let her eyes wander over the backs of titles such as "_101 Uses of Tanpick Toad Tongues", "The Theoretical Margins to the Transkinski Transfiguration Theorum" _as well as a surprisingly large array of muggle fiction with authors like Stephen King and Jeffrey Archer.

As the others toppled out of the fireplace Hermione turned when she heard the whish of robes that marked the passage of somebody coming down the hallway. McGonagall was wearing her robes with what appeared to be a large pink sunhat. When she caught Hermione's eye, Hermione couldn't help but grin when the older witch's eyes widened as she realised she was wearing the hat, before taking it off and placing it on a nearby hall table.

"I was gardening outside" she said by way of explanation.

Hermione just grinned. It was always somewhat surreal when one saw their teachers in the context of everyday living.

Once everyone was settled round on the couches, and McGonagall had served everyone with tea and scones that she assured them were perfectly edible, she set herself down on one of the single couches and let her gaze linger on each of them in turn.

"I want to apologise for making you come here before we head to Hogwarts, and for any inconvenience it might have caused you. I understand that you have all been somewhat busy since I last saw you" she started, looking at them.

Hermione ducked her head. Busy indeed. They had been taken to funeral after funeral after funeral. They had been thanked by hundreds and had shaken so many hands that faces had begun to blend into one universal image.

"I think you know why I have asked you to meet with me today?" she said, this time her eyes meeting Hermione's. Hermione shook her head slowly. She had no idea why they had to meet with McGonagall first. Surely all the people involved in the resurrection of Hogwarts would only need to be debriefed once?

"Next year Hogwarts will, of course, continue educating the young witches and wizards of our world. Hogwarts has been an establishment at the very heart of Wizarding Britain for centuries. However given the recent developments at the site of Hogwarts, with a large part of the castle having been destroyed in the most recent battles, we will begin planning the resurrection of the castle today" she said.

"If, however, the site is not fully reconstructed by the time the next term begins, then the Diggory's have offered one of their country estates for our purposes in the meantime".

Hermione nodded. That made sense. It was prudent to not rush the rebuilding as such a complex structure would need to be fixed carefully. They didn't want to miss anything in the restructuring of the building and by putting an ultimatum on the repairs they risked doing exactly that.

Hermione cast her mind to the Diggory's, to whom the war had hit so hard so early on.

"As for the four of you, as well as several other Hogwarts students, I think it is well known that your roles in the most recent war surpassed even that of most of the adults involved."

Hermione glanced up at Harry who was studiously inspecting his worn shoes.

"Some, particularly those involved in the Ministry, have suggested we allow such students to bypass the normal school system in order to start their careers earlier, with claims that their life experiences over these past few years far exceed any knowledge that an otherwise experience-less curriculum could offer."

Ron looked up at this. No doubt he was dreaming of the thought that he would never need to go back to school again. No more essays, no more detentions, no more potions.

"I, however, disagree" said McGonagall sternly, and giving a look to Ron that seemed to indicate she knew exactly how excited he was at the thought of never returning to school and how disappointed she was by that.

"I therefore am offering a compromise" she said.

"Those students who are deemed to have had extraordinary extracurricular involvements that can be considered as contributing to the skillset that young witches and wizards are expected to obtain through schooling may undertake a summer bridging program through which they will be accelerated through the normal NEWT curriculums for their chosen subjects. At the beginning of the school year they will sit the NEWTs for these subjects. If they should fail then they will be required to continue through the Hogwarts year as determined by their last year of attendance, and if they should pass these NEWTs then they may graduate in a beginning-of-year ceremony."

Hermione was speechless.

That would mean that, providing she passed the required test, her schooling would be over in just a little over two months.

Hermione felt her stomach lurch. It was incredible to think that her Hogwarts experience might be so close to finishing. If she did her NEWTs at the beginning of the school year...if she graduated a year early...

She hadn't given a huge amount of thought to the coming year, however the part of her that lived for schedules and diaries and lists had certainly thought that she would have a year left at school before she needed to decide where her future lay.

But to do her NEWTs now? After so much in her life had changed. After so much that had happened had made her question her own core values?

How could she go from life on the run as a fugitive one moment, only to settle down the next moment and get on with her studies as if her life depended on the outcome of an upcoming pop-quiz?

Sure, when she had been at Hogwarts the idea of failure was unthinkable. To even contemplate getting an error in one of her tests, or _not_ giving an extra five inches in an assigned essay...well it was not something she would ever have considered!

But now? Now she had seen grown men cry; watched as a young innocent girl was raped by her evil kidnappers; learnt through the cruellest means that friends and enemies often wore the same face; and watched her best friend sacrifice his life for people he had never even met.

No. She was not the same naive schoolgirl she had once been.

How could she go back to that?

She spared a glance at the other two. Ron was looking slightly sick at the thought of exams looming so close to his future. Harry didn't appear to have been affected at all. Instead he was looking into his teacup as if the answers lay within...despite his vast prior experience with the fallacy of divination.

Hermione looked back up at McGonnagall who wore a small smile as she sipped her tea.

But what else was there apart from school? What else was _she_ if not the intelligent, bushy-haired best friend and sidekick of Harry Potter? Everything she had done in the past few years, all the spectacular battles she had been part of, they were all just an outcome of Hermione playing the role that she had created for herself over the years by Harry's side.

Before Harry, when she was younger, she had been nothing but a walking encyclopaedia, a social outcast whose biggest achievement was her straight A++ record.

And maybe time hadn't changed that much.

Now, with all the friendships she had made and all the things she had achieved, well...she was still a walking encyclopaedia.

And because of that it seemed as if the decision had already been made. In truth, there was probably never even a decision to be had in the first place. There was nowhere else in the wizarding world to turn other than to continue along the current path.

Ron nudged her, and Hermione turned to look at him as he shot her a wide-lipped grin that seemed too large on his face. She knew he wasn't excited about the prospect of work, but could tell that he _was_ excited that he was getting a shortcut to the Auror training he and Harry so wanted to do.

Hermione had heard the two boys discussing it. Ron had been hoping that their adventures in the past might guarantee them a spot in the program. Harry had been determined to go through the same process as any other applicant, not wanting any special advantages on account of his name.

They had, of course, invited Hermione into their planning. She had replied quite pointedly that she had had enough of dark wizards trying to murder her, and that she was quite content to fight battles without the added inconvenience of bloody noses and torn clothes.

Ron had rolled his eyes.

Harry had nodded. Understanding in his eyes.

She had given professions some thought. But prospects such as magical law enforcement, or ministry administration positions, or even teaching did not appeal to her. It wasn't that she didn't think she would enjoy the work. It was because over the last few years she had come to realise that absolutely every position in the wizarding world was influenced heavily by the political warmongering of the Ministry and of the ancient Pureblood Families. Even Hogwarts wasn't immune to politics. Setting aside their fifth year, Dumbledore had used the power of his position in so many ways to influence events around him. Whoever held the title of Headmaster essentially moulded each generation of minds.

And with such a small wizarding world positions such as Headmaster at Hogwarts had an unlimited amount of influence over the wizarding world. Almost all of England's witches and wizards passed through those gates as children. It seemed unnatural that an entire country's population was educated by the same man.

It was almost dictatorship, thought Hermione wryly.

And she had had enough of it. Truly. There was only so much politicking that one could observe before growing well and truly sick of it.

She gave a small sigh that went unnoticed by the others, and looked back down into her teacup to the leaves, now saggy and arranged in odd clumps, that were left there. It made her thoughts drift towards their old Divination professor...how the outcome of an entire war had rested on a couple of sentences uttered by such a batty old lady decades ago.

McGonagall cleared her throat and Hermione and the boys looked up again.

The choice was pretty obvious. It wasn't like any of them had any other options.

* * *

That night Hermione sat clutching a hot chocolate in her hands as she watched the fireplace. Ron was sitting next to her with some sort of joke box the twins had given him. There was supposed to be a surprise inside if you worked out how to open it, and Ron was busily tapping his wand here and there and whispering words trying to work the puzzle out (Hermione had solved her own cube on the very first days the twins had shown it to them).

Harry and Ginny were side by side. They had obviously spoken and worked things out. Though Hermione thought she could detect some sort of hidden emotion beneath Ginny's outward smiles. It wasn't something for her to get involved in though, she knew, and she hoped the couple would work things out between them eventually. Theirs was not a fairytale romance, it was never going to be with such headstrong people with such complicated pasts, but they seemed to fit each other nonetheless.

She couldn't deny that she wished she felt the same about her own romance. She knew that on paper it seemed exactly as it should be. She and Ron had known each other forever, had both had crushes on each other for such a long time, and had been through all sorts of adventures with the other by their sides. They had stood by the sidelines whilst their friend became the saviour of the world, supporting each other and keeping each other strong whilst Harry dealt with his problems (often by losing his temper at them).

But now that everything was over Hermione just wasn't convinced that there was anything left. It seemed that all the magic and desire and underlying emotions had been stripped away with all the horror of war, that perhaps all that magic had in fact been somehow tied up and tangled with terror and tragedy, and that now all they were left with was the shell that seemed now a poor foundation for a future.

But neither she nor Ron had broached the subject yet. It seemed to Hermione that they were just moving with the status quo, reluctant to step out of the rhythm that their lives had become. Probably because it had been so long since any of them had had any semblance of a steady rhythm in their lives.

She moved her left hand towards Ron's knee and leant in to nuzzle the back of his shoulder. Reflexively he put his arm around her and drew her close.

Hermione tried desperately to feel anything, to feel like she knew she should with butterflies and heat and passion, but instead she simply felt wooden.

She sighed and leant in towards him. She did love him, but she was beginning to suspect that the love she felt for her redheaded friend was more the type of love one has for someone who shares your past, and not the love one should have for someone who shares your future.


	3. Chapter 3

**Okay, I am soooo sorry to anyone who stumbled upon my updated chapter yesterday. I don't know what happened but I accidentally uploaded a skeleton of a chapter and not the chapter itself! Arghh!**

**Anyway, here's the next chapter, and again I sincerely apologise to anyone who read that skeleton...I write terribly when I'm framing a chapter and then only once I start expanding on it do I begin to use 'proper' English sentences!**

**I hope those of you who have found this story are enjoying it. Reviews and constructive feedback are extremely welcome!**

Ron collapsed on the pillow beside Hermione. Hermione smiled, breathing heavily as she nestled back into the warm pillow. She turned to lay on her stomach and shifted her head to look at Ron who was lying silently and looking at the ceiling.

Hermione knew that it was during these moments after they had been together that Ron let his guards down.

It was funny, Hermione thought, that Ron had turned into an emotionally guarded person. He was such a heart-on-his-sleeve type of guy, and always had been. And yes, he could often act emotionally stunted when dealing with other people's feelings, but he tended to feel things very deeply himself. She had always been amazed that he seemed to have such obvious emotions. It was so easy to tell when he was angry, or sad, or happy or bashful. Everything from his ears to his eyes to the way his shoulders tilted in a particular angle when he felt defensive...everything he felt could be read from his body language. And Hermione had never had any difficulty in understanding him.

At least, that had always been the case in the past.

Now, since George's death and the end of the war, or perhaps since sometime during the war itself, Ron had become much more of a closed book. Hermione knew he struggled with his inner feelings but had no way to gauge what exactly those feelings were. She felt a little lost, like she had lost the ability to translate 'Ron-speak'.

But it was in these moments at night, when they lay in bed together and felt closer than at any other time, that he opened up again.

So Hermione watched him silently, his eyes flickering between the corners of the room as his breathing slowed and his mind began to function again. She could tell when he started, once again, to come back to the reality of their existence, the reality of post-war life.

"George didn't eat again today" Ron said quietly, eyes still fixated on the ceiling.

Hermione sighed. No, of course George didn't eat. He just lay in bed swamped in his misery.

"I'm really worried about him Hermione" said Ron, now rolling onto his side so he could be face to face with her.

"I mean, I get it. He's lost his twin, and none of us can possibly understand that...but _he's_ still here! I mean, what was the point of everything we did if the rest of us can't go on with the lives we all fought to keep?"

Hermione bit her lip. She had read stories of twin-twin relationships, and she had always been slightly awestruck at the way they seemed to share their very being. And Fred and George...well Hermione could count on one hand the number of times she had seen them separated. The pair had quite literally finished each other's sentences, and seemed to 'get' each other so well that it had crossed Hermione's mind more than once that perhaps their twin relationship allowed shared thoughts. It was one of those things she had always meant to look into but had never gotten around to.

So it was no surprise that George was struggling with Fred's death. In fact, she thought it was rather miraculous that he hadn't run off anywhere and was at least eating something every now and again.

"But I was thinking, and I want to know what you think, but maybe if I start cleaning up the joke shop then George might perk up a bit? Or do you think he doesn't want to be reminded of Fred?" Ron continued.

Hermione sighed.

"There's not really an answer to that Ron" she said. "Everyone deals with death in their own way. I mean, there's meant to be seven stages of grief...and I suppose we could say that George is going through the Depression stage...but I think that he probably just has to deal with it all at his own pace. And that might take weeks or months or years." She said.

"Yeah, but it will never be the same again, will it?" said Ron. She could hear the note of pain in his voice and she moved her hand towards his underneath the sheets.

"No. But we will always remember him. And he'll live on so long as we do. Don't forget that."

Ron sighed and rolled over, apparently deciding that he had had enough of their depressing pillow talk and wanted to sleep. Hermione shifted to the other side of the bed and tried to get comfortable, whilst trying to stop the flow of depressing images that were now assaulting her after talking about Fred. Images of Tonks and Lupin lying there, of little Colin Creevy, of the hundreds of others whose bodies had been heaped on each other in the Great Hall that day.

And these thoughts naturally led to her parents. Were they okay in Australia still? Had they managed to get on with their lives, safe in the lack of knowledge of their only daughter? Had they made friends? Did they even realise that there was something monumentally missing from their lives?

Tears came to her eyes and she blinked them angrily away. She knew that she had purposely been avoiding thinking about her parents. She felt terrible about what she had done to them. A deep and aching guilt that she had lied to them without telling them. That she had interfered with something so personal as one's memories.

She knew if she suddenly found out that her own memories had been tampered with without her knowledge, that she had an entire other _life_, an entire other _world_ that she was part of, she would be devastated. In fact, she thought she would probably feel incredibly violated.

And although she knew that she had to, the last thing she wanted to do was to face up to the music and claim responsibility to her parents that she, their trusted and only daughter, had violated them.

Whenever she thought about it she had a sick and heavy feeling in her stomach. There was a part of her that knew she was putting off the inevitable, but she much preferred imagining them sitting on some outback cliff in Australia watching kangaroos and throwing boomerangs than imagining the look of horror and disappointment in their eyes when they discovered the truth.

And what if she _couldn't_ reverse their memories?

That was the other thing she was terrified of. She had done a lot of research and reading about memory removal, and it was a delicate process. She had needed to reconstruct and entire life for the two dentists, to make them believe they had migrated to Australia for work opportunities and lifestyle rather than escaping a war.

And she had needed to remove any knowledge of the wizarding world, and of their daughter.

It had turned out to be a much more complicated process than she had anticipated. She had thought it would be somewhat similar to the spells that Ministry Officials used on muggles when they witness a magical occurrence. However unlike that spell, where one just removed a certain period of time from the memories, Hermione had been forced to construct memories as well, and that had been quite tricky.

She had been in Australia for well over a week with her parents as she had reconstructed their entire past. It had been without question one of the most difficult moments in her life, to sit in their living room in her assumed persona as their houseguest as she removed every trace of their knowledge of their only daughter.

To sit drinking coffee with her parents whilst they looked at her as if she was a stranger...it was an experience she hoped she would never need to repeat.

And now to fix it she needed to somehow convince Dr and Dr Granger to invite her into their home, somehow sedate them but not knock them unconscious, and then remove the implanted memories and unlock the memories she had hidden from them.

Thinking about how difficult _that_ was going to be just sent her mind whizzing in a hundred new directions.

She needed to _stop_ thinking. Now.

She rolled over and buried her face in her pillow, shutting her eyes tightly against the cool fabric.

When had her life ended up so complicated?

* * *

As the days and weeks went by Hermione distracted herself from the parental problem by investing herself in the Hogwarts cleanup. She and the others would apparate to outside the grounds each day and together they would trudge across the lawns to the remains of the castle.

Bill Weasley was proving to be a huge advantage as he worked on charting the wards. They needed an absolute understanding of which wards had been damaged, removed or had survived the battle.

The rest of them had by now cleaned up the debris and were now in the process of working out which areas needed the most work, and trawling through the building to find any salvageable artifacts that might have fallen to the wayside.

Harry and Ginny drifted between states of new lovebirds, where they spent every waking second touching each other and holding hands, to huge fights which she and Ron could hear from outside the house as the pair yelled and threw spells at each other and then didn't speak to each other for days.

It was hardly a steady foundation on which to build a relationship, Hermione thought to herself privately.

And it wasn't as if she and Ron were doing any better. They had fallen into their routine, and were simply going through the motions each day.

On top of all this, the bridging courses would be starting in less than a weeks time and Hermione had felt somewhat duty-bound to get them all ready for going back to school.

She had dutifully collected their stationary and books, had drawn up lists of the areas they had missed and also the areas in which their battle experiences might help (she could safely say they would be well ahead of the curriculum in their Defence Against the Dark Arts).

But even as she colour-coordinated their folders she found that she really didn't have the heart for it. It was as if there was a vital part of her was missing...or maybe she had simply grown up. But the drive she had always had towards academia, towards study, had faded. Just like her relationship with Ron, she felt she was simply going through the motions when it came to her schoolwork, and she wasn't sure what to make of herself.

The Ministry were picking themselves up. Obviously there were hundreds of trials to be held, and many positions needed to be filled as their previous occupants were either pronounced dead or were arrested.

Hermione had been dutifully keeping up with the news too, and was becoming increasingly disturbed at some of the articles contained in the Prophet. Soon after the fall of Voldemort it had come to the public's attention that Voldemort had been a half-blood.

The outcry within the wizarding world was unprecedented as people grappled to come to terms with the idea that the tyrannical dark wizard had been fighting what he himself was all along.

But once people had accepted this as fact, then Hermione had noticed a number of unsettling opinion pieces in the news. People started to imply that his muggle connection might have been at the root of all the evil, that perhaps he had simply been a confused man with a confused childhood (albeit a deranged murdering lunatic). There were some that were maintaining that perhaps the product of muggle and magical unions itself was the flaw, in which the offspring are part of both wizarding and muggle worlds but truly a part of neither.

Hermione had found herself wishing for an equivalent of a muggle psychologist to explain that just being a bit mixed up in the head didn't explain why someone would become an evil tyrant, that there had to be an underlying psychopathy for such figures as Voldemort to emerge. That the ability to empathise was a human trait that had been definitively lacking in the madman, and that one's birth simply didn't have any bearing on whether one would turn out a psychopath or not. But when she said these things to Ron they fell upon deaf ears.

It seemed Ron, and the general wizarding population, were much more comfortable believing that there was a visible cause for what had happened. The Ministry Officials gave interviews stating that they believed they would prevent such future events if they identified any muggle-magical children and fully immersed them in the wizarding world at a younger age. That children such as Tom Riddle who were forced to be raised within a muggle environment would be taken into the wizarding world by transferring their care to a new Ministry Department – "The Muggle-Magic Integration Department".

The idea of making children such as herself and Harry deny a very piece of their existence seemed monstrous to Hermione. However it seemed that she was alone in this view. Even Arthur Weasley thought the idea was ingenious, no doubt helped by the propaganda spewing forth from the Ministry as they tried to implement dozens of initiatives – the cynic in Hermione thought that the reason there were so many was that the Ministry was trying to hide how little they were actually capable of.

The Ministry had published in The Prophet articles such highlighting the educational benefits that muggle raised children would get within their new initiative because they wouldn't need the initial acclimisation when first entering Hogwarts. And muggle-magical families would be given Ministerial grants to support their magical expansion within their homes. For the purely muggle families the Ministry was going to provide summer courses where parents could send their children to learn more about the magical world. The aim being to make the children more comfortable within the wizarding world than as muggles.

The Ministry set up a Central Board for the Protection of Muggleborns, and created a 'Muggleborn Protection Act' which gave them the power, if the families resisted their integration processes, to forcibly remove those children from their parents. It was proposed that a foster network would be established, and muggleborn children destined to become magical would be 'adopted' into families and would therefore no longer be disadvantaged by their birthright.

Ron had told Hermione that these changes were a great step forward in wizarding history.

Hermione privately thought that they were a colossal leap backwards.

And Harry didn't seem fussed either way. He had retreated from the wizarding world, and any time that Hermione tried to engage him in conversation about the upcoming political changes, or about the events that had dominated their lives for the past six years, Harry would conveniently remember he had forgotten to turn off the stove, that a particularly important Quidditch game was on the wireless, or that he had a meeting he had to get ready for.

It didn't take a genius to work out he was avoiding the situation.

But Hermione also recognised that of all people Harry probably needed some time to adjust to reality once more.

* * *

Hermione sat at the kitchen table reading that morning's edition of The Prophet, a cup of hot coffee clutched tightly within her hands as she tried to warm them, and warm herself by sipping the hot liquid.

The boys and Ginny were still fast asleep, but she had woken up early as always. And as always she was using this uninterrupted time to gather her thoughts for the upcoming day, and once again listen to the internalised debate over when she should fetch her parents.

School was approaching, and she knew she needed to get her parents before school started. She also knew she was quickly running out of excuses for delaying the inevitable.

Last night Ron had asked her if she had thought about moving in with him after they completed the summer NEWT program, and she had been surprised by how much the idea terrified her. She had no idea if she even wanted things to get so serious with Ron so soon after the war. She wanted to talk to someone about things like that.

She wanted her mum.

Hermione put the mug down suddenly and pushed the plate containing her half-eaten toast away from her.

It was now or never, she decided suddenly.

She stood up, deciding to take advantage of this sudden burst of momentum and summoned her packed overnight bag from upstairs.

Today. She would do it today, before she could chicken out again, she thought resolutely.

Quickly transforming her nightgown into daywear and casting a quick cleaning and freshening spell on herself she checked her bag for anything she might need. She had packed it weeks ago with anything she thought she might need in the memory restoration process.

She scribbled out a note to the boys and placed a sticking charm on the door to the fridge – the only way that she could be certain somebody would read it.

And before she could think through her plans any further she lifted her packed bag over her shoulder and headed out the door.

* * *

The Department for International Apparation and Floo was surprisingly empty as Hermione made her way through the maze of corridors within the Ministry. The department was on the third floor of the Ministry, and she nodded to faces she vaguely remembered as she moved through the corridors.

International travel was in some ways easier and in some ways more difficult that travel in the muggle world.

Although it cost considerably less to magically travel internationally, both in time and money, the paperwork one was required to fill out was endless. Hermione gathered the forms from the witch at the Department desk and sat in a chair in the corridor sipping from a purchased cup of foul-tasting coffee and read over the forms.

She signed her name on each document, and then tapped her wand to confirm her magical signature. She was surprised at the sheer volume of rules and regulations that she needed to agree to. Things like "Form 1.3.98a: The Regulations for Chimaera Breeding and International Cooperation" seemed to be, to Hermione at least, completely unnecessary for the ordinary witch or wizard. Yet she dutifully filled out each required form before handing the stack of papers back to the witch at the desk, a young witch with bright green streaked hair who was chewing gum and blowing gum bubbles which chimed with a musical melody at each pop.

She barely gave Hermione a glance as she filed the papers away (Hermione noted the latest Witch Weekly that was half-hidden under the desk's appointment book) and then, with a final tinkling chimed pop she pointed towards the fireplace floo.

Hermione headed over and checked the floo schedule she had been handed. She would be required to make several floo jumps to get to her required destination in the English Embassy in Australia and was prepared for a day full of spinning fireplaces.

As the clock above the flooplace turned to 11:15AM (her first appointed floo jump) she tossed a pile of floo powder in front of her and stepped into the fireplace, turning on her heel and shouting "BRITISH EMBASSY, TURKEY" before disappearing in a roar of purple flames.

She landed with a thud before two strong arms grabbed her as she began to topple over. She lifted her head to thank the young woman who had caught her, and for a moment she could have sworn that the woman was the spitting image of Lavender Brown.

Shaking her head and mumbling her thanks she righted herself, checked her belongings were all in one peace and made her way away from the fireplace. She knew she had over an hour's wait before her next scheduled floo jump to Saudi Arabia, then on to India, Singapore and finally Australia.

She was half tempted to jump into a nearby fireplace and pay a call to Krum who, if she remembered his last letter correctly, was still playing with the Bulgarian National Quidditch Team. Despite war in England, the other countries of the world had continued and Quidditch had been alive and thriving despite the absence of England and Ireland's teams.

Ron and Harry had spent hours analysing old Quidditch game records that Mr Weasley had managed to obtain, and were now up to date with all the current game statistics, players and rankings. Hermione always rolled her eyes when she caught them engrossed in their yards of paper filled with player stats, or when they got into an argument over the latest player substitute rules. If they had put even half as much effort into their schoolwork she was sure that they would have received much better grades than they had.

But she supposed she shouldn't detour from her planned route. She knew that in all likelihood if she was to catch up with Krum she would be more than likely to use the visit as an excuse to avoid getting to Australia - a task she was finding more and more daunting as it drew closer.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

Finally landing in Australia Hermione managed to wrangle her way out of the Melbourne Magical Embassy and found herself in the centre of a bright city in the middle of the night. Somewhat disorientated she tried to calculate in her head what time it must be in Melbourne but was finding it hard to remember exactly how many hours to count forward or backwards.

She turned back to the Embassy doors but the darkness behind the windows suggested it was unlikely she would find much help in there. She wasn't at all sure what the policies were in Australia, nor whether they had facilities such as Knight Buses...she knew that they didn't have the big red British buses, and that they technically fell under the Queen's dominion, but aside from that she had never taken the time to look into the specifics of the destination she had chosen for her parents.

Even so, it was obvious she was in the centre of the city and all around her she could still see activity. There were men and women similar to her own age who were stumbling along the pavements, giddy in their night's adventures. There were security guards outside an entry she supposed was some sort of nightclub. There were shops she could see, convenience stores similar to those back home. She could see the rows of sweets along the counters and the stacks of newspapers by the door. Relieved by the familiar sight of late-night convenience stores she made her way over to one and asked where the nearest hotel was.

The man at the counter looked half asleep when he pointed her the street and told her that all the hotels were that way. She thanked him and hurried up the pavement towards the large lit buildings she now assumed were hotels.

Reaching the first one she staggered in, coat clutched tightly around her and her face burrowed within the folds of her blue woollen scarf. She _had_ thought that Australia was the land of sunshine, and had expected the weather to be, at the very least, a little chilly.

Instead she had trudged up the pavements outside with a miserable drizzly rain pouring down, trying to avoid the puddles on her way. Any thoughts of balmy nights were destroyed by the bone-chilling wind at her back, and she tried to remind herself that she was here during the Australians' winter...not that the thought cheered her up much.

She checked in at the hotel desk and made her way up the elevator and to her room. The bedside clock read 04:14AM and, although she thought she could detect a slight lightening of the sky outside, she decided that she desperately needed some sleep before the next terrifying step of her journey.

* * *

She woke up to the sound of a cleaning trolley outside the room and opened one eye to the now visible room. She shut her eyes tightly and flopped over onto her stomach to bury her face into her pillow. Sleeping with Ron had been catastrophic for her usual early-bird tendencies. In any case, tramping around the countryside with Harry and Ron had enabled her to sleep through most mornings as the trio had tried to sleep away the god-forsaken waking hours of the hunt.

She rolled over, and feeling muggle-ish she turned on the television to the morning programs, laughing to herself at the unfamiliar Australian accent of the television hosts. She looked around the room and recognised instantly the clean sheets and space that indicated she was in, at least, a quality hotel. She had exchanged enough galleons a few weeks ago in anticipation of her trip, and knew that she had more than enough to hide away in this hotel for a few weeks if she so chose.

Stretching on her back she started to sleepily get her things organised, to lay out her still-dripping coat, to find her umbrella within her bag, and to find some clean clothes to put on, before heading directly for the shower - a luxury she still thanked her lucky stars she was alive to enjoy every day.

Following that she put on her day's outfit and headed downstairs determined to find somewhere to grab some breakfast before putting together a plan of action. Just a few doors away from the hotel entrance she found herself a cute little cafe and ordered some tea and honeyed porridge. She smiled to herself at the look she imagined appearing on Ron's face when he heard she opted for oats rather than sizzling bacon and eggs, but a hot bowl of cereal was exactly what she felt like on a day where, outside, she could see rainclouds gathering promising a day of ice-cold wintry weather.

As she ate her breakfast she flipped through the paper that had been lying on the table, glancing at the headlines of this foreign country. Where she had come from a country putting itself back together after a war, it seemed somewhat surreal to read that the biggest news item was the questionable success of a tourism advertisement overseas.

* * *

Once breakfast was over and her teacup was drained, she made her way back to her room at the hotel and sat on the bed looking out the window and waiting for inspiration to come in the form of a plan for the day. Should she just turn up at their house unannounced? Should she 'accidentally' run into them at work and try to get herself invited over? Should she break into their house and wait for them to return home from work?

There were so many possible scenarios, and so many possible ways that everything could go entirely pear-shaped. Just the thought of some of these possibilities made her breath quicken and her pulse race. What if they hated her for what she did? What if she wasn't able to put the memories back together? What if they had moved since she left them here in Melbourne? What if they were happier now than they ever were with a magical daughter in England?

So many what ifs...

She steeled herself, taking three deep calming breaths before arranging herself cross-legged on the bed in the hotel room and unpacking her bag. She had carried her moleskin bag with her, so she had an enormous pile of things surrounding her by the time she had finished unpacking and arranging things in a semblance of order.

She decided that today she would rest and get her bearings here in Melbourne, and tomorrow she would go to the house she had arranged for her parents in one of the nicer-looking suburbs on the internet near a place called Camberwell. She had liked it because the name reminded her of England, and because most of the houses were stand-along one-story homes with gardens and it made her smile to think of her mother and father finally getting to entertain their fantasies of living in a countryside villa.

Having decided on a course of action she went to the desk in the room and pulled open the drawer containing a dozen or so brochures of things to do. She had never been to Australia, and didn't know anything about the city she was in. She had read that Sydney was the capital of Australia, and so had chosen the next largest city in hopes that if Death Eaters had tracked her to Australia they would target the main city before heading south to Melbourne.

She had a quick skim through the pile, and to be quite honest there seemed to be just the usual tourist attractions. There was an advertisement for a discount shopping district, for other shopping districts (apparently this was 'the place' to go for shopping), for theatre shows, for a place called 'Federation Square'...

She stopped, coming across an article about a musical that was in town that she had wanted to see in England before the war. The musical was Wicked and was based on the Wizard of Oz, a story she had dearly loved as a child and had watched again when she had been admitted to Hogwarts when she had dragged her parents to the video store and hired every single copy of any magical-related movie or television show she could find.

She decided that now was as good a time as any to see the play, and used her phone to dial the number of the booking agency in the pamphlet. On a second thought she bought three tickets for the following night, agreed to pick them up from the box office, and then put her handbag together before heading down to the 'Square' she had read about in the magazine.

She spent the rest of the day absorbed in a novel she picked up from a second-hand bookseller down by the train station she found by the river. It was a typical romance, and was exactly what she was in the mood for...pure nonsensical romance. She had spent quite a bit of time wandering the train station itself. It reminded her of her own Kings Cross, and she had amused herself by imagining where potential entrances might be for Australian magical students within the train station...although she wasn't certain if there even _was_ an Australian school of magic.

She had then settled herself in to read at a window seat in one of the cafe's above the river, watching the rain fall on the banks and the Australians busy about their business under the cover of multi-coloured umbrellas. It was easy to imagine she was back in England in the drizzle, with the exception of the weird straggly trees on the banks of the river which she assumed were the koala trees she remembered learning about in primary school. It was funny how she could remember such silly facts from her primary school days - such as that koalas get the majority of their water intake from the leaves they eat - information that was entirely useless to her now.

As the day wore on she ordered some hot soup and a bread role from the friendly waiter, then as night-time approached decided to head back to the hotel before it got too dark and she got lost. She wasn't at all sleepy, and she assumed this was because her body-clock had yet to reset to the timezone. But she also knew that there was a strong possibility that her parents would want to stay in Australia for a while to sort out their business, and so she would need to get used to the time difference sooner rather than later.

* * *

After an evening which Hermione had treated herself to a hot bath, her new book and a hot chocolate delivered by room service, Hermione was feeling quite rested as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes and glanced at the window of her hotel room.

Today, at least, the sun was shining.

A good omen.

She dressed much faster than she had yesterday, and debated whether or not to pack all her things into her bags and check out this morning. She was harbouring images of her mother greeting her at the doorway of their suburban home, welcoming her with open arms. She wanted nothing more than to fall asleep tonight on her father's shoulder as he read his latest book and discussed philosophy and science with his daughter.

But her wartime preparations had left her with the need to be prepared for anything. So rather than checking out of the hotel, she pre-paid for another few days and packed only her essentials into her moleskin bag.

She knew she was being overly cautious. But at the very back of her mind was the little voice that had, in the past, gotten her out of so many near-misses with Death Eaters. She knew better than to ignore it's warnings, no matter how trivial they seemed.

After all, what was the worst that could happen? If she was overly prepared then all that would happen is that she might seem a bit twitchy to her parents, and after such a long time since their last reunion would that really be an issue?

So she carefully packed her moleskin bag with anything she thought would come in handy if the worst was to occur. If she was suddenly imprisoned with her parents for instance, then she would need a couple of healing potions, her extra-large waterbag, some rations in case they ended up holed up in a cave somewhere on the run from Voldemort's followers.

She packed herself a change of clothes and some pyjamas, and then on second thought included some warm blankets...it never hurt to be prepared, she reminded herself.

And with a final look over all her things she was leaving in the hotel room she hoisted her bag over her shoulder and made her way to the Kings-Cross style train station she had found yesterday. Once there she worked out the ticketing system with the middle-aged man behind the glass counter, and then boarded a train to Camberwell.

It didn't take long to get there, and she was surprised by the sprawling suburbs she could see out the windows of the train. In England everybody lived on top of each other, especially if you were only a half-hour train ride from the centre of London. Here, even at ten minutes out of the city centre, houses had backyards and pools and gardens. With the sun shining down and miraculously not a raincloud in sight, the Australian suburbs looked like paradise.

She disembarked from the train at her destination and followed the ramp up to the street-level. She had evidently caught the train at morning tea time, because as she walked along the district's main street she could see that all the cafes were filled with people. Mainly mothers with young children who were supposedly too young to be at school and too old to be left in a pram.

She knew where her parent's house was, only a few minutes walk from this main street. Her plan was to go and check the house, ensure everything appeared in order, and then come back here and grab some lunch and a coffee and wait until the afternoon when her parents would return home from work. She was toying with the idea of putting a silent alarm on the front door of the house so she would be alerted to when they arrived home. It would be the easiest way to monitor it she supposed.

* * *

She walked the pavements and admired all the houses she passed. They were all large, homey style houses, with children's bicycles parked in front yards and rosebushes primly lining the footpaths. Hermione had to congratulate herself on her choice of location. At the time she honestly hadn't given the location must thought, other than that the destination to which she sent her parents must be relatively populated given their careers, and must be within the most muggle-ish neighbourhood she could find. She had settled on a neighbourhood that didn't seem to have any witches or wizards registered there (according to some Ministry files she had managed to get her hands on, although it was more than likely those were more than a few years out of date...no one ever seemed bothered to keep up with international statistics).

She turned at the street her parents' house lay on and started up the small hill. Keeping her eyes half on her path, and half on the houses she was passing she imagined herself living in one of these houses. White picket fence and everything. Imagine waking up to the morning newspaper, coffee and a croissant. Her husband (who in her mind didn't seem to have a face, and more disturbingly didn't seem to have red hair) would come into the kitchen with a new pint of milk from the corner store, and would lean over her shoulder where she was reading and whisper a few words in her ear.

She shivered. It always felt a little thrilling to imagine herself in such a life. Partly because there was a large part of her that didn't actually believe such an conventional way of living was within her reach, and partly because her little daytime fantasies never included the ones who she expected. She sometimes had dreams where she was living an ordinary muggle life, with no evidence of magic involved. And then she would wake up and her eyes would automatically move to her wand, and then she would roll over and see the moving quaffles on Ron's pyjamas and she would be drawn back into reality.

She stopped suddenly, realising that something was very, very wrong up ahead.

The house she had deposited her parents in so long ago, the little one-story stone house with the short red-bricked fence and the grassy front garden, was looking extremely neglected up ahead.

Suddenly feeling her heart beat faster Hermione began to walk more cautiously towards the house, unnerved by the dilapidated garden, the weeds in the front yard obviously overgrown. There was no evidence of vandalism, and rightly so given the number of muggle-repelling charms she had put on the house itself.

That in itself had been a challenge, finding charms to hide the house that she could enable her mother and father to bypass and invite friends in without knowing magic existed. It had required the careful rewording of some tricky spells, and some personally created wand movement embellishments. In fact, she had been rather proud of the outcome and had wanted to show Professor Flitwick her spells...although she never did manage to find a moment to tell hiim about them.

But this house was silent, with the cold eeriness that accompanies desertion. It wasn't the silence that comes from owners who are out for the day, or even out for a week, it was the silence that comes from a house knowing its owners have abandoned it.

It was the silence of war.

And it was a silence that Hermione had heard far too much of in the past year.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Hermione ducked behind a lemon tree that was in the front corner of the garden and made her way behind a string of bushes alongside the fence separating her parents' house from the neighbours.

She knew it was likely just post-war paranoia. That she was probably imagining the ominous, oppressive silence she could feel encompassing the house.

But what if she _wasn't_ imagining it?

She crept up to one of the windows and peeked in, there were no lights on but she could make out a living room furniture set, and a television. There wasn't any obvious sign of a struggle - no overturned chairs or broken lampshades. But there was also no movement. She squinted and could make out a coffee cup that was sitting on the coffee table in the centre of the room. At least that meant that her parents had not gone on holiday or moved house without her. No other muggle would be able to buy this house with her muggle-repelling charms still in place, and neither of her parents, no matter who they thought they were, would ever leave a coffee cup on a table if they were packing to go on holiday.

Which meant they were still here, somewhere.

Partly relieved, and partly even more terrified, she crept around the side of the house, edging past a hose and a couple of raised flowerbeds which were lying neglectfully in the shade. She edged around the corner into the backyard, wand in hand. She knew that if she were to run into one of her parents now she would really have no excuse for being there. To either of them she would be a stranger, in their yard, holding a stick as a weapon.

And something told her no amount of explaining would make that seem reasonable.

She crept around to the back door and peeked through the glass windows to the left of the door. Again she could not see any signs to suggest anything was out of the ordinary. But the feeling that something was amiss lingered, and she knew better than to dismiss her instincts.

She quietly whispered the spell to unlock the door and tiptoed her way into the house, hoping her stealth skills she had picked up in Britain's forests had remained with her.

"Hello?" she called cautiously, still not sure if there was anyone here.

THUMP

Hermione started and looked to the doorway on her right from which a loud thump had come from. There had definitely been something moving in the next room. She bit her lip and edged her way past kitchen cupboards towards the closed wooden door. She slowly opened the door, wand drawn.

"ARRGH!" she yelled as a heavy object was suddenly thrown at her face. She stumbled backward, with her right hand casting silent protective spells and her right trying to wrestle her face free of the furry mass that enveloped it.

She backed up against a kitchen cupboard just as she managed to get a fistful of fur and launch her attacker away from her.

Crookshanks slammed into the opposite cupboard with a cross between a loud miaow and a yelp.

"Dammit Crooks!" Hermione cursed, steadying herself on the cupboard.

Of all the things she had been expecting, a half-crazed half-Kneazle was definitely not on that list.

Crookshanks had by now righted himself and set himself back into kamikaze motion headed directly for Hermione.

Hermione, having regained her bearings, caught her cat and buried her face in his fur.

"Hey Crooks" she purred into his fur, "Hey...I missed you too" she said. She was suddenly overcome with homesickness, not for her actual home back in England, but for her parents, for their warm hugs and their soft smiles.

"MUM? DAD?" She yelled, and with Crookshanks in her arms (his claws still embedded in her shirt) and her wand drawn in one hand she dashed through the house trying to find any sign of her parents.

There was nothing.

She didn't understand. They obviously lived here, she couldn't imagine anyone else would ever put up with Crookshanks as a pet. And they obviously hadn't gone to work, because there were dishes in the sink and the chair at the dining table was still drawn out.

But no one replied to her calls.

Giving Crookshanks one last cuddle she put him down.

"Come on Crooks, where are they?" she asked the cat, whose big yellow eyes stared up at here before the overlarge cat headed off with a purposeful stride. He led her out of the small lino-lined kitchen and into the room she had previously glimpsed through the window.

The sitting room had light from outside streaming into it. The carpeted floor was vacuumed clean with not a stain in sight, and Hermione would expect nothing less from her parents. The heavy leather couches were set in a ring centred around the low lying coffee table she had seen earlier. She noted again the coffee cup on the table, and when she looked closer she realised that the cup was bone dry, the insides stained with the remnants of a cup of tea and some hardened congealed masses lined the bottom and were, she supposed, the remnants of tea leaves.

That a coffee cup had been left on the table was unusual enough. That her parents had left an unwashed cup there for so long that its contents dried into clumps...she honestly could not remember either of her parents neglecting the washing up ever. It was not a good sign.

her cat sat at the trapdoor in the floor that Hermione guessed led to the cellar, and she began to get the uneasiness within her stomach once more.

With her wand hand ready she lifted up the trapdoor and was suddenly engulfed in a smell that made her gag. Suddenly terrified she began down the steps, casting a _lumos_ as she entered the dark and musty cellar. There was a small corridor at the bottom of the steps, and she followed it through, pulling her scarf up around her mouth to ward off some of the stench.

The smell was something she knew all too well having just emerged from a war. And she could feel herself begin to go into shutdown mode as her steps brought her closer to the door at the end of the stony passage.

She creaked open the wooden door and reached for a light switch.

Turning on the light she froze at the sight before her.

Pinned to the wall were her parents. They were mounted on the wall in some sort of horrific version of artwork, their arms held wide from their torsos, their bodies forming crucifixes on the cellar wall.

Around her were racks of wine, rows of dusty bottles just the way her father liked it - he said it gave character to the age of the wine.

She couldn't draw her eyes from the gruesome sight. Her mother, dress half ripped from her body, and marks that might be dried congealed blood smeared across her chest. Her father, eyes closed and his face contorted into some unnatural pose. The nails holding them up in the air, large square old-fashioned nails, with areas of rust on their edges.

Their bodies were covered in old wounds, wounds that now seemed to be writhing as Hermione watched them. She took a step closer and her stomach lurched as she realised that the moving lumps were actually mounts of maggots spilling from the body cavities. What looked like bite marks, probably rat bites, lined their lower legs. And between the bites her parents' skin, or what was left of it, was greyed and discoloured and patchy.

Hermione clutched her mouth as her breakfast remerged, and she staggered one hand against the wall as she vomited violently on the floor, gasping for air when she had emptied her stomach's revolt.

She turned to look back at her parents and found herself gagging again.

It wasn't until Crookshanks pawed her ankle that she began to regain some semblance of consciousness to her surroundings, and she hurried back along the corridor, running from her nightmare vision.

Surely this was all a dream. Surely she would wake up any moment and she would find herself under the comfortable doona of the Melbourne hotel she was staying in, or even back in England where she would wake up to Ron holding out a cup of hot chocolate to calm her nerves like he did after a particularly bad nightmare.

She stumbled up out of the stairwell, Crookshanks close behind, and slammed the trapdoor shut. She then used all her bodyweight to push the living room sofa over the trapdoor, she didn't want to see it, before collapsing onto her knees and covering her head with her arms.

But even here, with her eyes closed, the image of her parents bodies strung up and macerated was burned into the innermost aspect of her eyelids. The image was perhaps the single most horrific thing she had ever seen - and she had been through a war chasing the broken remnants of an evil madman's soul.

This just _had_ to be a nightmare, a particularly gruesome and particularly vivid nightmare to be sure, but a nightmare all the same.

There was just no way, simply no possible way that the Death Eaters could have tracked down her parents here. She had covered her tracks every step of the way. She had been so meticulous in her hiding of them. Not even Ron or Harry knew where they were in Australia, and she had kept it that way to reduce any possibility of the information getting into the wrong hands.

Even the real estate certificates had been conducted behind closed doors, under the table, with characters she would normally not associate with in her darkest nightmares, and she had done all her dealings through three of four exchanges, so that even if one of her contacts gave up some information the knowledge would only lead the pursuer to more questions.

She could feel the heavy presence of Crookshanks alongside her, and she lifted her left arm to scoop him closer, bringing him towards her face where she could snuggle her eyes into his long coat. He seemed to sense her distress, because rather than acting his usual disagreeable self he stayed still and didn't even attempt to free himself from this clingy and panic-stricken girl.

* * *

Hermione wasn't sure how long she stayed there like that, crouched on her knees on the floor curled up into herself with her face in the coat of her cat. Time seemed to have lost much of its meaning.

Crookshanks seemed to have contented himself with the return of his owner, and was quietly purring, the vibrations reverberating through Hermione's own face. It was comforting, to focus on the constant rumble, to let everything else slide away.

Because to focus on anything else at this moment would be to descend into madness.

And she stayed that way for what may have been minutes or hours, until suddenly a car revving up the street outside reminded her of where she was.

She straightened up, suddenly feeling a hundred years older as she moved her stiff back. Her feet were numb, and as she moved her legs in front of her to get the blood flowing the sickening feeling of sensation rushing into them made her cry.

At least, she would attempt to convince herself it was that which was causing the racking sobs that had started.

And again she felt paralysed, and she shifted herself to the edge of the leather couch that still lay above the trapdoor where she had pushed it. She lifted herself into the leather seat and suddenly her head fell into her hands and she could focus on nothing but her heart-wrenching sobs as she cried out with everything she contained.

She had been through dozens of funerals in the last few weeks, but although she had shed tears she could not remember a time, ever, where she cried like she did now.

It seemed for a moment as if her entire being _was_ her misery, and she choked on her own despair.

Crookshanks resumed his place by her side on the couch and continued to purr in the distance as Hermione felt herself break into pieces as she sat on the brown leather chair in the middle of her parents' sitting room in a city she didn't know and in a world she didn't want.

* * *

Time passed once again, and by the time Hermione began to calm her breathing the sky outside was beginning to dim. It was cold. Freezing. And a chill that Hermione suspected had less to do with the weather and more to do with the bone-weary emptiness that had descended on her made her shiver.

She gathered Crookshanks into her lap and lifted herself up off the couch in search of a blanket to warm herself. She wandered into a bedroom that she guessed was her parents, the bed was made up with a heavy dark blue doona and the display cushions her mother always insisted on decorating their beds with were lined up along side each other.

Hermione lifted one edge of the bed spread and slipped beneath the covers, pushing aside the decorative pillows and unmasking the plain white pillows that were for sleeping on. She buried her face in one of them, trying to breathe in any lingering scent of her mother or father, but she couldn't find anything of them in the pillow. She tried the other one, and again failed to find any lingering impression of either of her parents. She didn't mind though. This was where they had slept while she had travelled around England in a tent.

She curled up beneath the covers, smiling when she felt the weight of Crookshanks land on her lap once more. She knew her faithful feline wouldn't leave her when she was so distraught, when so much of her life had just been torn to pieces. He was a loyal companion, and she was once again grateful to whatever fates that had directed him into her life.

There was a part of her that was surprised by how calm she was.

There was a part of her that was screaming, a high pitched wail that was endless.

And then there was the part of herself that was taking over her actions and thoughts at the moment. Simply talking her through each breath, locking the screaming, wailing, desperate part of herself into a dark, far cavity in the deepest recess of her mind.

Because, for the time being at least, it was all she could do to just keep breathing.

She lay in the bed, curled up against her parents pillows and her big orange cat.

Her mind was blank except for the focused thoughts on breathing.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Hermione closed her eyes, continuing this mantra. Comforted by its regularity, by the steadiness it gave her.

And, lying in her dead parents' bed, Hermione eventually succumbed to sleep, exhausted. Her entire life, her entire being, had just been turned inside out and upside down. She had been ripped apart, the jagged shards of her life biting her insides.

In.

Out.

In.

* * *

It was pitch black in the room when Hermione awoke in the dusty light of dawn. She rolled onto her back as she tried to place where she was.

She was in Melbourne. She had gone to her parents house...

And just like that the events of the previous day came flooding back.

She grabbed Crookshanks (who let out a fierce protest at being so abruptly woken) and sat straight up in bed and trying to get a handle on herself before she could spin out like she had the previous day.

Her parents were dead.

It was her worst nightmare, and it had become her reality.

She felt simultaneously petrified, lost, alone, and above all incredibly guilty.

How could she have let this happen to them?

She knew that they had no way to protect themselves against magical attackers. But instead she had sent them off to Australia without even the knowledge of how to defend themselves from a magical attack.

She should have found another way.

She should have moved them into Headquarters.

She should have made them live at Bill and Fleur's house.

She should have begged and pleaded with the Order to let them assign a guard to her parents' protection.

And instead she had abandoned them as she raced across the country.

..

_Her parents had died not even knowing she was alive._

..

It was this final thought, more than anything, that made Hermione collapse back onto the bed. She couldn't seem to muster the energy for the tearful anguish she had displayed yesterday. She couldn't seem to find the energy to do anything. She felt utterly spent.

She rolled over, relishing the numbness that had settled over her. She closed her eyes and restarted the counting game she had played with herself as she went to sleep the night before.

Eventually Hermione forced herself to get up to go the bathroom, and after that made her way into the kitchen and went through the comforting and repetitive motions of boiling the kettle for a cup of tea.

She decided to take things one step at a time, and methodically worked her way around the kitchen cupboards to find the cupboard with the teacups.

She wasn't hungry. She wasn't even sure if she would keep down her tea.

So she sat on the couch, still sitting on top of the trapdoor that seemed to emit the remnants of its ghastly contents into the bright living room. She sat, still enjoying the relative numbness and the peace it brought with it.

She decided she needed a plan. So she sipped her tea as she went through the things she would need to do today, detaching herself from the emotional reality and trying to focus on the logistics of her coming day.

First she needed to deal with the bodies, they were sitting down in that cellar and needed to be disposed of in some way.

She remembered a spell she had read about during the war - _agnikar_ - that cremated bodies without disturbing the surrounding environment. She had learnt it in case the need arose to dispose of fallen death eaters on their horcrux hunt.

Instead, it seemed as if it would come in use today for its true purpose.

Then she would need to gather her parents things. Thankfully magic made this a much less daunting prospect than it might otherwise have been.

And then she would need to disable the anti-muggle charms on the house, and then she could leave.

A straightfoward plan always made Hermione feel a little more stable, giving her some structure in her world. And right now this mental structure was all that was holding her up.

* * *

Hermione managed to go from room to room, shrinking and summoning all the objects into a roller-suitcase she had found in her parents' closet.

Next she packed up Crookshanks' basket and cat-toys before going to the kitchen and banishing the contents of the fridge and pantry. She had no need of any of these items, and she knew the muggle authorities would, at some stage, realise that the house had been abandoned and would reclaim it for new owners.

Finally, with the entirety of her parents lives sitting snug within the suitcase she stood at the trapdoor that she had once more uncovered by moving the couch.

She knew what she needed to do. And right now she felt like she could handle it.

But she was terrified that when she reached the cellar she would fall apart all over again, and she couldn't afford to fall apart right now. She couldn't let herself be anything but practical. She needed to embrace this numb emotionless being for as long as she lasted.

And immersing herself into that cold pool of emotionless void she opened the trapdoor and headed down the stairs once more.

This time her stomach didn't revolt at the sight awaiting her in the cellar. This time she paused for a moment to collect herself at the threshold of the room, before pulling out her wand. She wrapped her head once more in the scarf to ward off the stench, and pointed her wand at the two bodies on the wall.

_These are just their bodies. They've moved on to someplace better_ she told herself. Trying desperately to think of the bodies in front of her as simply corpses, but unable to completely separate the despairing little girl inside herself who had seen a sight that no child should need to see, the mutilated bodies of her parents.

Quickly she cast the cremating charm, and within seconds all that was left were the nails still embedded in the wall, their cargo now dissolved into dust and sprinkling onto the floor of the cellar.

Hermione pulled a small china pot out from her jacket, and waving her wand again she summoned all the dust particles to form together, and then managed to manoeuvre the formed clump into the pot.

It wasn't exactly an urn, but her mother had loved that china pot. It seemed fitting somehow.

With that task done Hermione turned back, away from the deathbed of her parents, and made her way back to the living room to collect her belongings and her cat. Together Crookshanks and Hermione locked the front door, disabled the anti-muggle charms, and started their way back down the small suburban street.

It was only once Hermione had reached the train station once more that she realised her cheeks were wet with tears.


End file.
